GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA. 275 



is almost equally difficult to obtain. The best plan for coping with 

 these difficulties, he suggests, is to vest the conduct of these 

 operations in the hands of the Geological Survey, who would arrange 

 for sets of boring and mining plant to be stored at a convenient 

 centre, the actual duties being entrusted to a mining manager with 

 a small staff of subordinates, selected in some cases from young 

 men trained in an engineering school like Sibpur College. By this 

 means mining questions would be settled more quickly and econo- 

 mically, and a class of trained reliable men would be gradually 

 formed in India ready to fill the many posts now filled by highly 

 paid men imported from England or the Continent. 



Dr. King paid a visit to Baluchistan and the Sind frontier to 

 inspect the coal outcrops and oil resources in those parts. At 

 Khost on the Sind-Pishin Railway thin seams of tertiary coal were 

 being worked at the outcrops a mile or so behind the station, but 

 in face of the very fitful continuity of the coal and the extremely 

 unstable character of the beds above and below, necessitating a costly 

 mode of holding up the workings, Dr. King recommended a close 

 stratigraphical survey of the valley before further extension of the 

 operations. As to petroleum, that brought to the surface by 

 Mr. R. A. Townsend at Khatan gave good promise, and Dr. King 

 says there are other likely localities among certain bands of the 

 tertiary rocks. 



During the year Mr. La Touche's deputation with the Kashmir 

 Durbar came to a close ; he had not only given valuable information 

 regarding the sapphire rocks in the Zanskar district, but also on 

 the Jammu coal and the ironworks and ores near the village of 

 Soap in the Kashmir valley. On his return through Murree he also 

 furnished a report on the water supply of the station. 



Owing to the demand for latest information respecting the 

 geological structure of the Himalayas, and to the fact that there 

 had been no general review of our knowledge thereof since the 

 publication of the " Manual," Mr. Oldham put forward a valuable 

 paper in the " Records " on the sequence and correlation of the pre- 

 tertiary sedimentary formation of the Simla region of the Lower 

 Himalayas. A later paper of his on the geology of the North- 

 Western Himalayas gives further observations in Spiti, Ladak, and 

 Kashmir. Mr. Middlemiss also contributed a further paper 

 (No. III.) on the study of the crystalline and metamorphic rocks 

 of the Lower Himalayas, Garhwal, and Kumaun. 

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